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Editorial Reviews
"Everyone who has ever stood in line as a clerk [and] fussed over a finicky, computerized check-out machine, or wondered why computers seem to complicate life instead of simplifying it, will appreciate Landauer's cleanly argued and thoroughly readable book."
—Elizabeth Corcoran, Washington Post
Product Description
"Everyone who has ever stood in line as a clerk [and] fussed over a finicky, computerized check-out machine, or wondered why computers seem to complicate life instead of simplifying it, will appreciate Landauer's cleanly argued and thoroughly readable book." -- Elizabeth Corcoran, Washington Post
Despite enormous investments in computers over the last twenty years, productivity in the very service industries at which they were aimed virtually stagnated everywhere in the world.
If computers are not making businesses, organizations, or countries more productive, then why are we spending so much time and money on them? Cutting through a raft of technical data, Thomas Landauer explains and illustrates why computers are in trouble and why massive outlays for computing since 1973 have not resulted in comparable productivity payoffs. Citing some of his own successful research programs, as well as many others, Landauer offers solutions to the problems he describes.
While acknowledging that mismanagement, organizational barriers, learning curves, and hardware and software incompatibilities can play a part in the productivity paradox, Landauer targets individual utility and usability as the main culprits. He marshals overwhelming evidence that computers rarely improve the efficiency of the information work they are designed for because they are too hard to use and do too little that is sufficiently useful. Their many features, designed to make them more marketable, merely increase cost and complexity. Landauer proposes that emerging techniques for user-centered development can turn the situation around. Through task analysis, iterative design, trial use, and evaluation, computer systems can be made into powerful tools for the service economy.
Landauer estimates that the application of these methods would make computers have the same enormous impact on productivity and standard of living that were the historical results of technological advances in energy use (the steam engine, electric motors), automation in textiles and other manufacture, and in agriculture. He presents solid evidence for this claim, and for a huge benefit-to-cost ratio for user-centered design activities backed by descriptions of how to do these necessary things, of promising applications for better computer software designs in business, and of the relation of user-centered design to business process reengineering, quality, and management.
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- Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science: Volume 65 - Supplement 28: Behavioral ImPatts of Consultative Systems: A Structural Model for User Reliance ... Query Performance with Database Feedback by Allen Kent on page 206, and page 208
- Making the Information Society: Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities by James W. Cortada on page 409, and page 449
- In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, Is the key to Future Prosperity by Eamonn Fingleton in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers (Interactive Technologies) by Jeff Johnson on page 465, and Back Matter
- Vandals in the Stacks?: A Response to Nicholson Baker's Assault on Libraries (Contributions in Librarianship and Information Science) by Richard J. Cox on page 28, and page 70
See all 39 books citing this book
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